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An anonymous reader writes "In a tentative move onto the internet, Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared. The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment. For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure, along with more recent titles like "House of M" and "Young Avengers."
Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print.
Dark Horse Comics now puts its vibrant and large images of 'Dark Horse Presents' up for free viewing on its MySpace site.
DC Comics has also put issues up on MySpace, and recently launched the competition-based Zuda Comics, which encourages users to rank each other's work, as a way to tap into the expanding Web comic scene."

First off, I said geek, not man.In this situation, a man would walk up to the front door of marvel's HQ, debate the morale issue of breaking in, and, depending on who wins the argument, would break in or piss on the door handle and leave.

A geek would do the following: use wireshark to see how it is requested. It is probably just tunneling it over HTTP/HTTPS to avoid firewalls from breaking the flash file. If it is http, no brainer. Look at the requests, find the patterns, write your script.

Or use Mozilla's media properties to find the path to the image and then paste that into IE, right click and save to get the original. (I've noticed that sometimes a page of image data isn't recognized as an image in Mozilla but it is in IE.) Or submit a request over telnet and pipe the response into an appropriately named file. There is no way to provide content using existing cross-browser compatible web technologies which cannot be saved locally by a knowledgeable individual.

I wonder if these aren't going to be the same digital comics as have already been released in packages by GITCorp. They've already released full runs for X-Men, Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Iron Man. I've bought them all. It's not been exactly cheap at $40 per package but since you get 500+ comics with each package you're getting a lot of bang for your buck.

I have often thought that I would be very interested in a subscription service for comics, but now wit

I purchased two of these for my girlfriend, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. The only problem (which I'm sure you're aware of), is that some series like X-Men did a lot of story line branching into mini series and spin-offs, which are not contained within these anthologies.

Plus, once you have 500 comics in PDF format, they just scream to be put onto a mobile device, or eBook reader, but I haven't figured this part out yet. Maybe I can load a few issues at a time onto a flash card and read them from my OLPC =D

PDF is a horrible format for comics, unless you intend to print them, and you should only think about doing that if you access to a very high quality printer designed specifically for this kind of work.

Scene rips of comics use the excellent Comic Book Archive file [wikipedia.org] format, which is an archive (usually ZIP or RAR) with an image file (usually JPEG) for each page of the comic. The archive is typically renamed with a different extension to identify that it is meant to be viewed sequentially (.cbr for RAR archives and.cbz for ZIP archives.) Suitable viewing software (e.g. CDisplay [wikipedia.org]) sequentially decompresses each page and displays it. It's a much simpler, more elegant way of viewing comics than PDFs and with much less overhead.

Viewing comics on a laptop can be great, especially if the laptop is widescreen - you simply rotate the desktop 90 degrees and you've got the perfect aspect ratio for comic pages. I regularly read comics on my laptop fullscreen at 800 (width) x 1280 (height).

I imagine it would be great on a machine like the XO because the screen folds right over, giving you a very convenient read.

in your preferred viewer. If CDisplay/Comix/whatever supports DjVu, the CBR could

DjVu can also contain an OCR layer. I'm looking for a time past CDisplay's "dumb" mode, where we can run OCR and hand enter character tags with dialog. Make the archives searchable. It would be cool to be able to do a search for some combination of heroes and villains or specific dialog that would let me open that actual page. Kind of the way text-based subtitles were added to DIVX rips of DVDs.

However, based on the wiki, it does seem to be superior, if indeed it can compress a color comic page to "40-70kB". As the wiki states, around 500kB is standard for comic rips (unless you're one of the super-anal collecters that do lossless PNG rips of their stuff, as well as buying an extra copy to keep in mylar on acid-free paper), so the format looks interesting.

That's OK. The vast majority of people are not "knowledgeable individuals", neither do they have the patience, and as such, will not bother with figuring out how to save these comics. It's the same principle that keeps movie people encrypting DVDs long after DVD Shrink became available: most people will by a new copy of a DVD rather than figure out how to make a backup before they destroy it.

All you need is a minimum of security through obscurity on your product and most people will either pay for it o

The catch with that logic in the case of back issue comics, is those people also only go for the latest and greatest. In this case much like the Disney or Warner's cartoon character range is they simply waited to long to digitally release their products and now there is a huge range of newly created material out there. One things computers are really good at is producing endless reams of 2d cartoons and full animation is getting cheaper by the day.

Or download the torrent (or get a copy from one of the tens of thousands who has).

I was almost done with Judge Dredd complete run with Demonoid went down.

Why mess with a page at a time when you can get gigabytes.

The media companies are overpricing this service.

They need to charge a low price for "any time, reliable" download access.

$9.99 for that amount of content is a joke.

It reminds me of when I used to work in long distance billing software.

Cost of the call... $.011 centsCost of billing the call $3.75

Same thing here-- the cost of simply putting the content up on a server is probably under $1000 and any money above bandwidth costs would be pure profit. However, the effort of surrounding it with DRM probably cost $100k in analysis, salaries, extra DRM servers, licenses, etc.

Yes, they certainly have been downloaded. Most of them are sitting on my shelf in a DVD case.My favourite place for comic downloads is zcultfm.com. Get yourself a membership there and check the "newest submissions" forum every day. You'll never lack for comics again.

Or, if you don't want to bother with that, just go to the bittorent site of your choice and type in "dcp" for "digital comics preservation". You'll see weekly packs of new releases there.

I don't like piracy, and I don't advocate it. That said, you can't beat the Chronological X-Men torrents. Simply incredible stuff for comic buffs.Hell, I was out of comics for 20 years or more (Heavy Metal excepted) and this is what got me back in.

Thing is, I have bought over $4K worth of Ultimate collections (X-men, Spider-man, House of M, Civil War, etc.) because I want the quality books in my own hands. So if Marvel doesn't over-react, I think they have nothing to fear from those of us who want the re

Ha, I am 41. I started collecting the X-Man again after I searched in 2006 after the comic heroes that I once had 30 years ago. Once I figured out it where the X-Man, I had to look for what I could get. It took some time before I discovered Marvel Masterworks. A bit pricey, but I can afford it, and like you say, somewhat neater than buying the comics themselves.

However, I like to scrounge around in second-hand book shops and online, and I am collecting the Dutch versions of the X-Man. It takes time and pat

In the long term, this is of course a good thing. However, the idea that issues 1-100 of X-Men will encourage anyone to take it up is, at best, optimistic. Let's face it; they may have been good at the time, but nowadays they're extremely dated. Of course, it does have Iceman looking like a snowman and Cyclops being called 'Slim' which might be good for a laugh, but overall I don't think they'll encourage many people.

Oh, from the article:Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder WomanAhem.

Of course, it does have... Cyclops being called 'Slim' which might be good for a laugh, but overall I don't think they'll encourage many people.

See? Cyclops was called "Slim" and he wore shades, predating that great alter-ego of your rap hero Eminem by almost four decades. </pathetic-attempt-to-make-1960s-pop-culture-relavant-to-today's-youth>

In the long term, this is of course a good thing. However, the idea that issues 1-100 of X-Men will encourage anyone to take it up is, at best, optimistic. Let's face it; they may have been good at the time, but nowadays they're extremely dated. Of course, it does have Iceman looking like a snowman and Cyclops being called 'Slim' which might be good for a laugh, but overall I don't think they'll encourage many people.

When I was around 10 years old, someone got me a subscription for the reprinting of the fir

I highly doubt the original copies would be devalued by this. There is some novelty in owning those rare items. To make an analogy of it, reprints of the Mona Lisa are nearly worthless, the original is priceless. Not that I think that _Amazing Spiderman_ #1 is a Mona Lisa, but I'm sure many somebodies would disagree with me.

As for the digital back prints, I find that a very fascinating prospect. I was always curious about how those original series kicked off but never so curious to spend the time and

My only hope is that this doesn't lead to the death of the physical copy of a comic book. I still go back every few years and read through my old collection, and the fun of reading a physical comic book never gets old.

There's no reason to think that comics will stop being published. They clearly sell enough of them to make money even though the number of people buying them today isn't a tenth of the numbers from 20 years ago.

There's nothing bad about this idea (having started a subscription last night, I

They clearly sell enough of them to make money even though the number of people buying them today isn't a tenth of the numbers from 20 years ago.

In the US. Many other places in the world comics sell just as well. In Europe even small markets like Norway (4.5 million people) have comics that far outsell most US comics, though US style superhero comics don't appear to do that well despite much better presentation (both Marvel and DC comics get republished in Norway as magazines with anywhere from around 6

It'll do a better job of interesting people than current comics do, which cater solely to an small, incestuous niche audience. Ok, not all of them do, but the majority of the mags in the marvelous worlds of Marvel and DC have shriveled to small and dark figments of what they were in the 60's, 70's, and 80's.

I began getting into comics by illegally downloading Ultimate Fantastic Four and then moved over to House of M and its tie-ins. After a month I moved to the beginning comics of Fantastic Four, Daredevil and X-Men. While they are horribly dated, it was fun to see where these comics began. With the more modern stuff, such as Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes included (which coincidentally isn't available on torrent), including the older stuff while people are there doesn't hurt.
With this launch I'm going t

True. I bought the X-Men Ultimate CD_ROM which has all of the issues on one disk (only about $8 or so). It displays as a PDF that is unreadable when made to fit my 15" laptop screen and way too big when put at readable resolution. Hopefully they will take care of this for the online version, but I couldn't even get through the first issue....

With books, I whole-heartedly disagree.With comics, you are very much correct. I tried reading some comics (manga) on a 15" laptop... It was the most portable thing I had that was big enough. A PDA is way, way too small, and sitting at a computer to read is annoying. I came to the conclusion that a $2000 tablet PC (possibly a ModBook Pro) would be the best solution... And that it wasn't worth spending $2000+ to read a few comics.

For comics to look right on a computer screen, they'd have to be able to a

I picked up a Toshiba M200 tablet for $500 refurbished. I got it mostly as a sketchpad, but I found that it works great for reading manga as well. Especially as it has a a little joystick built into the face allowing easy turning of the pages in tablet mode. This particular model is better than many of the other tablets in that it's screen resolution is 1280x1024 instead of the more common 1024x768 they put in most tablets. The only real downside is that it's a little heavy.

I am not a big comic gal, but I used to read Xmen. I stopped when they split it into a handful of titles. I have a buddy that got fed up with reading Spiderman, for a similar reason. He needed multiple titles to see what was going on. It was a blatantly an effort to make those of us who were into it, buy more. It didn't work for us, we stopped collecting. I started reading indi artists.

Are you kidding? That's why when I was a kid, I always read DC comics, as the Marvel ones always had the cliffhanger-- rather than lock me IN to the story as was intended, that always locked me OUT because it was an obvious ploy and I would be left hanging and I really hate that. Once in awhile the DC stories would have a 3 or 4 issue story, but they would usually tell you in advance and it wasn't hard to get the whole group-- most stories were self contained so you didn't get something incomplete and/or

Hey, True Believers, the response to Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited has been so overwhelming, we're just doing a bit of routine maintenance to make sure you have a great experience! We'll be back shortly. Thank you, Marvel.com.

As with everything else, the older stuff looks great because we forget about all the junk that no one ever bought. That being said, there is some classic Chris Claremont stuff and John Byre stuff from the 80s that I keep on reading even now.

The first 50 issues of New Mutants. Uncanny X-Men 100-200, Fantastic 4 140-175. Good stuff all around.

That being said, I have all of these in print and have no moral reason against downloading them in.cbr format from a.torrent site.:-)

The first 50 issues of New Mutants. Uncanny X-Men 100-200I'd agree with you on the New Mutants, but I still remember Uncanny 175; the last issue of the X-Men I bought. It's the one where the Jean Grey clone (Madeline Pryor?) turned out to be another bloody Phoenix. X-Men 137 (I think) was one of the finest stories ever to come out of marvel, and by resurrecting, reinventing and cloning Phoenix (initially for the poxy X-Factor, and later for other inane reasons), Marvel served only to piss off its loyal fans

I've been out of comics since the X-Men animated series. Ever since I started playing City of Heroes, I've been wanting to get back into them, already bought a lot of Transmetropolitan.
Here's hoping they'll eventually put up something like Civil War, so I can see it and hate myself for reading it.

$10 per month seems a little excessive to me. In fact this looks more like a cash in than a 'let's get a new generation interested'. The only people willing to pay that sort of cash are Baby Boomers reliving their childhoods.

It really depends on the titles going up. I used to collect comics and pay up to $30 a week to keep up with my favorites. I don't have that kind of money anymore, so $10 per month for unlimited reading of any available title seems like a nice deal when I really just want to catch up with the stories where I left off four years ago. That is granted they offer unlimited reading of all titles for one fee (which it sounds like they are).

Indeed. I got the special edition of Xmen III and it came with some old marvel stuff. I'm sorry, but the old content is good for nothing but nostalgia. The writing in excruciatingly painful to read. Now pardon me while I go watch Transformers (G1).

I don't think they are trying to get folks hooked by reading the classic issues or if they are its a dumb idea. Anyone reading the classic issues and picking up a new issue of Xmen, Captain America, Spiderman (et al) will wonder if the guy writing today's issues ever read the classic issues. The only thing the new issues have in common with the old ones is the name.

This isn't marketing, this is trying to find a new market for old content.If I had the comic-book fan mentality, I'd be really excited by this. After the first Spider-Man movie came out, I was sufficiently impressed to go out and buy some reprints of the early comic books.

Two big disappointments: the reprints are available only as line drawings, which destroys a lot of the impact of this kind of comic. And the stories were just plain dumb. (I mean jeez, they show a Mercury space capsule flying around like a

Except by using the subscription model they get people to read a lot more then they otherwise would. I just read Last Hero Standing, I wouldn't have ever considered reading that before, but because it was included with what I wanted I gave it a shot.

I meant that discussion deserves a thread of its own and shouldn't derail this thread.Now in order to get this post marked off-topic, I need to give my opinion.

Personally, I think "a limited time" in a legal sense is sometime less than the maximum human lifespan. The oldest verified living person was Sarah Knauss who died at 119 years of age just two days before the Y2K scare. From time to time there are claims of people living past 120. If I were a court, I would immediately strike down anything over 12

If they really wanted people to pay for this, they'd put up the late-70s through late-80s stuff. That was the PEAK of Marvel, as far as writing/storylines goes. Before that...eh. There was some good stuff, but not all that much. And pretty much ALL of the good stuff from the early days is widely available in "compilations" that are dirt cheap. As in, clearance-bin cheap, most of the time.

Marvel, and comics in general, have a problem here. It is the same problem that the other entertainment industries are facing. Scanned comics are already a reality online. They are on the torrent sites right beside the music and movies.

However, one thing that makes digital comics a little different from other media is that the community has had to create their own file formats, standards and viewing software. While the means to play movies and music files have been built in for as long as they have been technically possible, there is no long standing computer format designed to show a series of pictures. So, the community has created their own standards in using re-named zip and rar files and viewing applications created to display them.

So, now Marvel is trying to get into the digital market. They have a problem here though. The market already has some well defined segments. The first is the people who already read comics on the computer. This is going to be a hard segment to win over. Not only do they have their own practises and conventions, but their selection is up to date and in-depth. 99.9% of the (surviving) comics ever produced by Marvel or DC are available, from WWII right up to the new releases each Wednesday. Trying to compete with this using not simply a limited, protected format but one that is incomparable will be vary hard.

The next market segment is comic fans who do no already download. This is going to be a small market. It is limited to those who are not digitally inclined and thus poor targets for any digital service, or who have chosen not to download for various reasons.

The final market available are people who are not currently into comics. Unfortunately for Marvel, traditionally when launching a new service the smallest returns are going to come from outside the established fanbase. And those who become interested are likely to divert to the 'pirate' comics scene if only to avoid having all the surprises spoiled six months before they can read them.

Is this worth doing? Absolutely. I suspect that it won't take much interest for Marvel to at least break even. Costs on this have to be minimal, and much of it can be written off as basic archiving work that is necessary anyways or possibly already done for other projects in the past. It is also good to see them start to look at new distribution channels. As an industry, they have been fossilized for the past 20 years.

Still, you would think that after a watching each other, one of the various entertainment industries would work with, or at least follow, the communities when it came to digital media.

They should've just made a Youtube for comics. Allow people to make and publish their own comics with their custom software. And their content library would've been perfect to spark interest.They can make money via advertising, via "premium" accounts with value-added featuers, via merchandising (where the money goes to the author, but they get a cut), etc. That seems to be the model that a lot of web comics follow. The problem is that the barrier to entry is still particularly high. Imagine if the barriers

The next market segment is comic fans who do no already download. This is going to be a small market. It is limited to those who are not digitally inclined and thus poor targets for any digital service, or who have chosen not to download for various reasons.

On the contrary, "comics fans who don't already download" is probably 98% of the comics market. These are precisely the people they're going after. Most people don't download because they don't know it exists, it is inconvenient, or they don't want to

While the means to play movies and music files have been built in for as long as they have been technically possible, there is no long standing computer format designed to show a series of pictures. So, the community has created their own standards in using re-named zip and rar files and viewing applications created to display them.

A community-created standard would maybe be less technically advanced due to funding issues, but I think that in the end, they will probably more user friendly.

I would prefer to watch movies as bundles of video, sound and a wide range of subtitles.

Let me play a Japanese movie with Spanish dubbing and Norwegian subtitles. And no, I don't want every single language on earth encoded into a single file. Can we get some modularity, please? I want to keep some 3-5 languages to cover anything in my family, but no

Here are my guesses. That is all they are because much of this was standardized by the time I even know it existed. I think it has a lot to do with the time it got started.PDF would have had strikes against it due to the overhead. When the standards were established it would have still been Acrobat 4 and 5, which had big overhead at the time. Also, the community has always had a Linux and Mac component. Acrobat has not always been available for all.

TIFF does allow different pages to be different dimensions, and is extensible enough to hold just about anything imaginable via a nonstandard tag or two. The real hangup is that good TIFF handlers aren't as straightforward as a simple paging JPEG viewer, and the effort isn't really worth it.

The alt.binaries.dcp.comics group stopped posting zero day releases a couple weeks ago on usenet, purportedly due to a DMCA takedown notice to the chief uploader of the group. SPeculation is that the notice came from Marvel. I wonder if these events are related?

You might be interested to know that the online trading and downloading of comics is just as active as music or video trading- perhaps less popular, but still very active. A comic site I visit regularly has "Release Wednesday" download links in the forums, right on that Wednesday, and almost all of the major comics released that day. I think Marvel is doing this to combat that as well as falling sales.I personally think it's great, and plan to buy in. It won't put a huge dent in comic piracy, as it won't in

"...Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared... For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure... Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded..."

So: the shit is forty-four years old. What's the big fucking deal if people print it? Or download them so they can read them while on a flight? You don't have to give up your copyrights. It's not like you're releasing the characters into the public domain and all of a sudden you'll see stickers on the backs of Chevy pickups depicting Spider-Man pissing on a Ford logo. (Not that copyright laws have prevented Bill Watterson's 'Calvin' from being abused as such anyway.) You're not making it available to all to print infinite copies--just your typical "personal use" type of thing. And what if people do start printing them, binding them, and selling them? Guess what: that means there's a market, shitheads! Print NICE collections at REASONABLE prices and watch them fly out the door.

I can only assume that Stan Lee and the others learned a lot about their craft by a) reading old stories and myths and b) looking at old art. What if the complete works of van Gogh, da Vinci, Homer,* Shakespeare, and all the rest were under such draconian control? Would you even be an artist if Sonny Bono had been alive in 1000 BC? Why even charge at all, you hypocritical fucks? You've already made some money once. Releasing them for free might actually grow the comic audience. That would inspire some new fans (and probably some new artists.) Rather than always trying to get a bigger slice of the pie, why don't you try to make the whole pie bigger?

"The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment."

Consider the other angles. I am not a huge comic fan. But, it's a big part of our culture and yes, I would kind of like to see how Spidey, the X-Men, and all the rest came about. If I did, maybe I'd become a fan and start buying the current stuff. But I do not care enough to pay and jump through a lot of hoops. So I'll continue to be the non-comic-buyer that I am.

It's a very simple question: do you want to a) gain new fans or b) milk your existintg fan base? I think we all know the answer. Probably because that's an easier sell to the bean-counters: rather than possibly making a huge pile of money by exponentially increasing the market, they'd rather just have a smaller but predictable amount--"Lucas has shown us the way. X% of existing comic buyers will pay $Y per month for whatever we shove down their throats. That will net us $Z in 2008."

Also: "can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded"? I guess these douchebags never heard of screenshots, either.

* no, not Simpson, I mean the old Greek guy.

PS: sorry for all the swearing, but this stuff really, really, really pisses me off.

There's no need for apologies. After all, the whole point behind swearing is to indicate when something's really, really, pissed you off. On the content of your post though, I agree with you totally. Media companies are really rather conservative whores when it gets down to it. They're so worried about breaking the medium and changing things.

Part of the problem is the bean counters. They need real data, real numbers which they can then aggregate and present to shareholders and investors and use to help s

These were all on CDROM recently. I know because I saw a stack of boxes at "Half Price Books" for $5 each. And you owned them for that $5, and could read them whenever you liked throughout the year, without having to pay $120.

and new issues will only go online at least six months
after they first appear in print.

Only six months?

C'mon, guys, we follow a strict "OYATM" policy to let the publishers get
their fair share! Let's not go undercutting...

Oh, waitasec... Heh. Nevermind.

More seriously, what gives with only putting "teaser" issues online?
As with almost all traditional media, they just don't
seem to grasp that I can already obtain their entire back-catalog
in high-res (higher than the original printing, in most

this company just wants money.... they have stories run in multiple books to milk the cash cow even more.

Gee, DC would never [wikipedia.org] do [wikipedia.org] anything [wikipedia.org] like that.
DC invented [wikipedia.org] the universe-wide crossover event spanning multiple titles. Such things have become summer fixtures for both companies.

their dated characters rehash the same stories over and over to infinity.

You mean like having WWII-era superheroes fighting a multiverse-shaking battle-to-end-all-battles? Yeah, never seen that before...

This post reminds me of a DC panel at one of the Cons where a fan asked some DC execs "How's it feel to be whipping Marvel's ass?" (during the post-Infinite Crisis DC sales implosion) and was promptly laughed out of the room by the entire audience.
Seriously, besides JSA and Hellblazer (which is Vertigo, so it doesn't count), there's not much worth reading on the DC side of things. Well, except the couple times a year an All-Star Superman sneaks out...

they have forgotten about making a comic into a engaging story and relied upon art to sell the books.

Even assuming that were true, then at least they still remember the damn art, unlike most DC stuff. And to say the company that's printing Daredevil/Captain America/Hulk/New Avengers/Iron Fist/New Universal is the one which has forgotten how to write an engaging story is the same as saying "I don't (ever) read any Marvel books but I'm going to give you my opinion anyway." I'll take the company with Bendis/Brubaker/Ellis anyday.

marvel attracts kids, dc keeps the adults.

See, funny thing is, I work at a local comic shop on occasion. Spend a lot of time there when I'm not working. More adults do buy DC comics, than kids, true, but that's because no one's buying DC comics. Meanwhile both adults and kids are snatching up Marvel titles so fast I'm actually having trouble getting some of my regulars (boss stole an Iron Fist out of a customer folder for me this past week, for instance...)

the company has nothing left to offer and it has not created anything significant in decades.

At least they're not strangling under some parent company that won't let them do anything interesting with their characters out of fear of ruining the movie properties based on them (ala Warner Brothers and Batman). Give me a break.

Seriously, besides JSA and Hellblazer (which is Vertigo, so it doesn't count), there's not much worth reading on the DC side of things.

You really shouldn't count Vertigo out. Granted, it's not "The DCU," but a significant percentage of what's worth reading comes out under that imprint. Fables can't come out fast enough, and the end of Y - The Last Man will leave me a few bucks richer every month. Even the spinoff Jack of Fables is worth picking up every month.

"I think this attempt is doomed to failure, at least in terms of growing their readership and fan base. Charging a monthy access fee? Who do they think will pay this? You want to hook new readers on to your stuff, but tell them "hey, it's great, trust me. Pay up and you'll see how great it is!"? That's not going to fly."

$4.99*12/2 = £30. Sounds good to me.

I'll bite if they can quickly build up their portfolio so that I can catch up on the last 20 years of comics that Ive missed. And if the format is c

He was the last artist on the classic X-Men before they went on hiatus -- yes, folks, before the late Dave Cockrum and Len Wein brought them back, and before Chris Claremont, Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin turned them into the hottest thing since Superman, the biggest prize puppy in the entire Marvel kennel had been cancelled.